The singular line that snakes its way up the center of Paul Huxley’s luminous turquoise canvas brings forth the metaphysical concerns that occupied the minds of Huxley and his post-modernist contemporaries. Huxley toys with the relationship of image and form, exploring the ambiguous moment at which his line moves from painted mark to image and vice versa. The lines meandering shape lulls the viewer to affording it associative identities.

The critic David Thompson commented in 1964 on Huxley’s abstractions, saying he “Huxley would not particularise them, to himself or to the spectator, but they would not be valid if one did not feel oneself wanting to name them. Huxley is concerned with the metaphor: as with many modern painters, an unexpected juxtaposition of words, even in a dictionary, can spark an image for him; he has sometimes used green precisely because it is a colour with unavoidable associations. He is committed to a type of painting that uses the simplest possible elements. But they have to contain multiple meanings, a condensed complexity of effect.”

This painting is a characteristic example of his works that evoke enlarged brushstrokes, rendering the singular line the subject matter. Such works made up his first solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London, 1963, in which Line on Turquoise likely made its debut.